Pakistan’s first fully automated biochemistry laboratory was inaugurated at Aga Khan University Hospital (AKUH), Karachi today by Mr Firoz Rasul, President of the University.

This state-of-the-art lab, capable of processing 8-10 million clinical chemistry tests annually, represents a milestone in diagnostic testing in Pakistan. For the patient it means even more accurate test results within a shorter period of time. For AKUH, it will increase the clinical laboratory’s workload capacity two- to three-fold.

“With over 700 test menus offered, the University Hospital’s laboratories perform over seven million tests every year, processing samples from Pakistan as well as Afghanistan, the UAE, East Africa and Central Asia,” said Dr Farooq Ghani, Director, Clinical Laboratories, AKUH. “The automated system has streamlined and improved the analysis of blood samples, increasing not only our capacity but our efficiency as we can provide improved quality, a reduction in lab errors and a shorter and more predictable turnaround time.” The system also requires less space and fewer staff helping meet cost improvement objectives.

All samples coming for testing are also bar coded – the codes contain patient and test information – to eliminate any id errors and speed up testing.Additionally, almost all the centers, the 11 regional labs and the main lab in Karachi have been linked electronically, allowing test result to be reported as soon as they are performed.The automated lab will help the University Hospital maintain a high quality diagnostic testing service not only for its patients within the hospital but within the wider community in Pakistan and elsewhere serviced by more than 190 laboratory collection units.

via Source, AKU-Press

If you are spooked by Friday the 13th, you’re in for a whammy of a year. This week’s unlucky day is the first of three for 2012. And it would come as no surprise if many among us hold at least some fear of freaky Friday, as we humans are a superstitious lot.

Many superstitions stem from the same human trait that causes us to believe in monsters and ghosts: When our brains can’t explain something, we make stuff up. In fact, a 2010 study found that superstitions can sometimes work, because believing in something can improve performance on a task.

Here, then, are 13 of the most common superstitions.

13. Beginner’s luck Usually grumbled by an expert who just lost a game to a novice, “beginner’s luck” is the idea that newbies are unusually likely to win when they try out a sport, game or activity for the first time.

Beginners might come out ahead in some cases because the novice is less stressed out about winning. Too much anxiety, after all, can hamper performance. Or it could just be a statistical fluke, especially in chance-based gambling games.

Or, like many superstitions, a belief in beginner’s luck might arise because of confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is a psychological phenomenon in which people are more likely to remember events that fit their worldview. If you believe you’re going to win because you’re a beginner, you’re more likely to remember all the times you were right and forget the times you ended up in last place.

12. Find a penny, pick it up … And all day long, you’ll have good luck. This little ditty may arise because finding money is lucky in and of itself. But it might also be a spin-off of another old rhyme, “See a pin, pick it up/ and all day long you’ll have good luck/ See a pin, let it lay/ and your luck will pass away.”

11. Don’t walk under that ladder! Frankly, this superstition is pretty practical. Who wants to be responsible for stumbling and knocking a carpenter off his perch? But one theory holds that this superstition arises from a Christian belief in the Holy Trinity: Since a ladder leaning against a wall forms a triangle, “breaking” that triangle was blasphemous.

Then again, another popular theory is that a fear of walking under a ladder has to do with its resemblance to a medieval gallows. We’re sticking with the safety-first explanation for this one.

10. Black cats crossing your path As companion animals for humans for thousands of years, cats play all sorts of mythological roles. In ancient Egypt, cats were revered; today, Americans collectively keep more than 81 million cats as pets.

So why keep a black cat out of your path? Most likely, this superstition arises from old beliefs in witches and their animal familiars, which were often said to take the form of domestic animals like cats.

9. A rabbit’s foot will bring you luck Talismans and amulets are a time-honored way of fending off evil; consider the crosses and garlic that are supposed to keep vampires at bay. Rabbit feet as talismans may hark back to early Celtic tribes in Britain. They may also arise from hoodoo, a form of African-American folk magic and superstition that blends Native American, European and African tradition. [Rumor or Reality: The Creatures of Cryptozoology]

8. Bad luck comes in threes Remember confirmation bias? The belief that bad luck comes in threes is a classic example. A couple things go wrong, and believers may start to look for the next bit of bad luck. A lost shoe might be forgotten one day, but seen as the third in a series of bad breaks the next.

7. Careful with that mirror According to folklore, breaking a mirror is a surefire way to doom yourself to seven years of bad luck. The superstition seems to arise from the belief that mirrors don’t just reflect your image; they hold bits of your soul. That belief led people in the old days of the American South to cover mirrors in a house when someone died, lest their soul be trapped inside.

Like the number three, the number seven is often associated with luck. Seven years is a long time to be unlucky, which may be why people have come up with counter-measures to free themselves after breaking a mirror. These include touching a piece of the broken mirror to a tombstone or grinding the mirror shards into powder.

6. 66 Three sixes in a row give some people the chills. It’s a superstition that harks back to the Bible. In the Book of Revelation, 666 is given as the number of the “beast,” and is often interpreted as the mark of Satan and a sign of the end times.

According to State University of New York at Buffalo anthropologist Philips Stevens, the writer of Revelation was writing to persecuted Christians in code, so the numbers and names in the book are contemporary references. Three sixes in a row is probably the numeric equivalent of the Hebrew letters for the first-century Roman Emperor Nero. [End of the World? Top Doomsday Fears]

5. Knock on wood This phrase is almost like a verbal talisman, designed to ward off bad luck after tempting fate: “Breaking that mirror didn’t bring me any trouble, knock on wood.”

The fixation on wood may come from old myths about good spirits in trees or from an association with the Christian cross. Similar phrases abound in multiple languages, suggesting that the desire not to upset a spiteful universe is very common.

4. Make a wish on a wishbone The tradition of turkey bone tug-of-war goes back a long way. Legend has it that first-century Romans used to fight over dried wishbones — which they believed were good luck — and would accidentally break them, ushering in the idea that whoever has the largest bit of bone gets their wish. Bird bones have also been used in divination throughout history, with a supposed soothsayer throwing the bones and reading their patterns to predict the future.

3. Cross your fingers Those wishing for luck will often cross one finger over another, a gesture that’s said to date back to early Christianity. The story goes that two people used to cross index fingers when making a wish, a symbol of support from a friend to the person making the wish. (Anything associated with the shape of the Christian cross was thought to  be good luck.) The tradition gradually became something people could do on their own; these days, just saying “fingers crossed” is enough to get the message, well, across.

2. No umbrellas inside … And not just because you’ll poke someone’s eye out. Opening an umbrella indoors is supposed to bring bad luck, though the origins of this belief are murky. Legends abound, from a story of an ancient Roman woman who happened to have opened her umbrella moments before her house collapsed, to the tale of a British prince who accepted two umbrellas from a visiting king and died within months. Like the “don’t walk under a ladder” superstition, this seems to be a case of a myth arising to keep people from doing something that is slightly dangerous in the first place.

1. Friday the 13th If you’re not scared of Friday the 13th, you should be scared of the word used to describe those who are: friggatriskaidekaphobics. (An alternative, though just as tongue-twisty, word for the fear is “paraskevidekatriaphobia.”)

For a superstition, the fear of Friday the 13th seems fairly new, dating back to the late 1800s. Friday has long been considered an unlucky day (according to Christian tradition, Jesus died on a Friday), and 13 has a long history as an unlucky number.

According to the Stress Management Center and Phobia Institute in North Carolina, about 17 million people fear Friday the 13th. Many may fall prey to the human mind’s desire to associate thoughts and symbols with events.

“If anything bad happens to you on Friday the 13th, the two will be forever associated in your mind,” said Thomas Gilovich, a psychologist at Cornell University. “All those uneventful days in which the 13th fell on a Friday will be ignored.”

As you read these words, try paying attention to something you usually never notice: the movements of your eyes. While you scan these lines of text, or glance at that ad over there or look up from the screen at the room beyond, your eyes are making tiny movements, called saccades, and brief pauses, called fixations. Scientists are discovering that eye movement patterns — where we look, and for how long — reveals important information about how we read, how we learn and even what kind of people we are.

Researchers are able to identify these patterns thanks to the development of eye-tracking technology: video cameras that record every minuscule movement of the eyes. Such equipment, originally developed to study the changes in vision experienced by astronauts in zero-gravity conditions, allows scientists to capture and analyze that always-elusive entity, attention. The way we move our eyes, it turns out, is a reliable indicator of what seizes our interest and of what distracts us. Scientists are now using eye-tracking technology to explore how we learn from text and images, including those viewed onscreen.

In a study published last year in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, for example, Finnish researchers examined how the type and placement of advertisements affects online reading. Not surprisingly, data from their eye-tracking equipment showed that the sudden appearance of an ad or motion within an ad (think of all those advertisements with frenetically dancing figures,) distracted readers in a way that interfered with their comprehension of the text. But study author Jaana Simola, a cognitive scientist, and her colleagues were able to refine these observations further: ads placed low and to the right of the text were more distracting than those located above the text, and multiple ads containing both animated and static elements were harder to ignore than groups of ads that were either all still or all moving.

Of course, disrupting our attention is what advertising is all about. Scientists are also using eye-tracking technology to discover how to eliminate distraction and improve focus. In a study published in the journal Psychological Science, researchers Elizabeth Grant and Michael Spivey tracked the eye movements of experimental subjects as they viewed a diagram and tried to solve a hypothetical problem: If you were a doctor, how would you use a laser to destroy this patient’s stomach tumor without harming the healthy tissue around it? People who successfully solved the problem, Grant and Spivey found, looked more often at a certain part of the diagram. In round two of their experiment, they visually highlighted this feature — and doubled the number of participants who got the problem right. Showing people’s eyes where to go can actually promote insight and improve reasoning, the authors concluded; in their words, “guiding attention guides thought.”

The ability to focus on the relevant features of a visual scene is one of the most important differences between experts and novices in any field — an ability that is developed over years of looking at countless similar scenarios. But what if the characteristic eye movements of experts could be recorded and then replayed for beginners, giving them a model for how and where to look? That’s what scientists at the University of Exeter in Britain did in a study published last year. The eye movements of an experienced surgeon were captured by eye-tracking equipment and then mapped onto a video of a simulated surgical task, showing where the expert’s gaze would be directed as he performed the operation. Trainee surgeons who watched the video learned much more quickly than students who were taught in more traditional ways, like showing them how to move the surgical instruments with their hands.

Eye movements are so closely tied to the way we think and act that they can even reveal information about our personalities. In a study published this month in the journal Cognition, researcher Aaron Risko and his coauthors asked experimental subjects to complete a questionnaire gauging their levels of curiosity, defined as a desire for new knowledge and new experiences. The scientists then used eye-tracking equipment to record the eye movements of participants as they viewed a series of scenes. People who tested as highly curious, Risko reported, looked at many more elements of the pictures, restlessly moving their eyes around the scenes. “Who a person is,” he concluded, “relates to how they move their eyes.”

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The list of honours the Aga Khan has received during his illustrious lifetime consumes three pages in Wikipedia. In this country alone, he’s been named an honorary Companion of the Order of Canada and granted honorary Canadian citizenship – just the fifth person, and first Muslim, ever so honoured. He also has 19 honorary degrees from universities around the world, including five from Canadian institutions.The latest came Friday from the University of Ottawa, which awarded him an honorary doctorate for his service to humanity.

The 75-year-old hereditary Imam of the world’s Shia Ismaili Muslims, who assumed the position in 1957, has earned the recognition. An unstinting advocate of the virtues of pluralism, he’s the founder and chairman of the Aga Khan Development Network, now one of the world’s largest private development networks. ”His work has bettered the lives of people in communities around the world,” said Huguette Labelle, who awarded the honorary degree Friday as her last official function as chancellor of the University of Ottawa.

Allan Rock, the university’s president, said the Aga Khan – who is properly addressed as His Highness – speaks directly to the goodness in all people. By his words and actions, Rock said, he has demonstrated that “there are no divisions among us if our desire truly is to create a better world.” In a reference to Friday’s snowstorm, Rock also confided that the Aga Khan had told him he was a great fan of skiing, “but not necessarily on the sidewalks.” The Aga Khan is a complex figure. He’s a revered spiritual leader, but also a billionaire who owns hundreds of racehorses, an exclusive yacht club on Sardinia, several estates around the world, a private island in the Bahamas and a $150-million highspeed yacht. He’s twice married and divorced.

When he rose to speak Friday after receiving his degree, the Aga Khan focused on a single topic: The difficulty of establishing workable constitutional systems in developing countries with limited experience with democracy. He said the Arab Spring had brought special attention to this challenge, illustrating that “it is easier to rally people to opposition to a particular government than to forge agreement about new governing processes.” Many developed nations, he observed, have developed “two-pronged political structures,” where one party forms a government while the other constitutes the opposition. “This arrangement can foster greater accountability and even a certain stability.”

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The complete  International Financial Reporting Standards – Pocket Guide 2011 is available for Download in Pdf Version.

The Book can be download from:

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Why do heavy coffee drinkers have a lower risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, a disease on the increase around the world that can lead to serious health problems? Scientists are offering a new solution to that long-standing mystery in a report in ACS’ Journal of Agricultural & Food Chemistry.

Ling Zheng, Kun Huang and colleagues explain that previous studies show that coffee drinkers are at a lower risk for developing Type 2 diabetes, which accounts for 90-95 percent of diabetes cases in the world. Those studies show that people who drink four or more cups of coffee daily have a 50 percent lower risk of Type 2 diabetes. And every additional cup of coffee brings another decrease in risk of almost 7 percent. Scientists have implicated the misfolding of a substance called human islet amyloid polypeptide (hIAPP) in causing Type 2 diabetes, and some are seeking ways to block that process. Zheng and Huang decided to see if coffee’s beneficial effects might be due to substances that block hIAPP.

Indeed, they identified two categories of compounds in coffee that significantly inhibited hIAPP. They suggest that this effect explains why coffee drinkers show a lower risk for developing diabetes. “A beneficial effect may thus be expected for a regular coffee drinker,” the researchers conclude.

via Source

It turns out to be difficult to tell when other people are lying
By Art Markman

There are lots of cues that we believe will tip us off to whether someone is telling the truth. We expect people telling the truth to be more confident, to look us in the eye when they talk, and to speak more fluently. But, these cues aren’t really reliable indicators of truth telling. Someone might be uncomfortable talking about a topic and look away from you, yet still be telling you the absolute truth.

A nice set of studies by Tom Gilovich, Kenneth Savitsky, and Victoria Medvec in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1998 made this point. They had people answer questions about themselves to a group. Some people were asked to tell the truth, while other people were told to lie. Afterward, the speakers who lied were asked to rate how many people in the room would think they were lying, while those in the audience rated each speaker for whether they were telling the truth or lying. Speakers who were told to lie strongly overestimated how many people would know they were lying. They felt as though the evidence for the lie was leaking out of them, even though the audience actually had a hard time determining who was lying and who was telling the truth.

So, do liars leave any trace of their lies? My colleague at the University of Texas (and a fellow faculty member in our program in the Human Dimensions of Organizations) Jamie Pennebaker took up this issue in his highly readable book The Secret Life of Pronouns.

Pennebaker is interested in the way that people use language. You might think that liars and people telling the truth talk about different things. In his analysis, though, liars and truth tellers use language in subtly different ways that are hard for people to detect, but can be pulled out of detailed analyses of the words people use. In particular, Pennebaker and his colleagues take samples of text and count different types of words that people use. For example, they count the types of pronouns people use. Are people using first-person pronouns like I and me, or are they using third person pronouns like he and she? Are they using cognitive words like “I think that I was told about that,” or do they just say “I was told about that?”

If people are engaged in a conversation, they tend not to remember these kinds of words when people are using them, because they are focused on what the speaker is trying to say. However, analyses of the words people use suggest that you can separate the lies from the truth. In his chapter on lies, Pennebaker compared writing of stories that were either truthful or false from a number of different sources ranging from stories by the reporter Stephen Glass who was eventually fired from his job at The New Republic when it was discovered that he had faked a number of his stories to the writing of people who were asked to write either about a traumatic experience that happened to them or one that they imagined happened to someone else. They even analyzed court transcripts from witnesses who were thought to be credible versus those who were convicted of perjury (for whom there was strong evidence that they were lying).

An analysis of the words used in these stories revealed a few reliable differences. Stories that were true had more words in them and more details than those that were fake. The true stories had fewer emotion terms in them than the fakes. The true stories had fewer verbs than the fakes. Finally, the true stories had more first-person pronouns in them than the fakes.

Perhaps the least surprising aspect of lies is that they are shorter and have fewer details. It is just harder for a liar to come up with specific details of circumstances that did not happen to them. Consequently, stories that are false tend to have fewer words overall and fewer descriptive words than those that are true. You might think that true stories would have more emotion terms in them than would the lies. But when people are telling the truth, they know how they feel, and so they often don’t feel the need to express it. People who are lying need to make the point that they (should be) experiencing a particular emotion, and so they are more prone to talk about it.

The difference in the number of verbs comes primarily from the use of language devices that create some distance between the speaker and the situation when someone is lying. For example, someone telling the truth might say, “I knew better than to do that,” but someone lying might say, “I ought to have known better than to do that.” Finally, people telling the truth use more I pronouns than people who are lying. The analysis of court transcripts found that defendants who were found guilty at trial but were later exonerated based on DNA evidence often used first-person pronouns. The expressed their innocence by talking about themselves. Defendants who were guilty of perjury used third-person pronouns (like he and she) as they tried to shift blame to other people.

In a number of studies, Pennebaker and his colleagues took sets of texts and used these principles to classify the truthful ones from the lies. They were typically able to do so correctly about 75 percent of the time (where 50 percent is chance). That is not perfect, but it is far more accurate than even expert judges can be. What does this mean for us? It is hard (or perhaps impossible) to train yourself to become sensitive to these differences in language use. When you are talking with someone, you have to focus on what they are trying to tell you. And your language system is not designed to keep track of all the little words that help people express what they are trying to say. So, chances are you’ll still have to hope that most people are telling you the truth most of the time.

However, there are implications for the legal system. Pennebaker points out that it is exceedingly difficult to figure out who is telling the truth based just on our memory of what they are saying. Word counting programs like the ones that he uses increase our ability to separate truth-tellers from liars. Physiological measurements like those used in lie-detector test also help to separate truth-tellers from liars. These techniques are not perfect, but no forensic techniques are perfect. Perhaps it is time to revisit the role of devices that can indicate the truth of a witness to help juries reach decisions.

via Source

The mistletoe may be tucked away for another year, but Valentine’s Day tchotchkes already are overflowing on store shelves. And in these weeks between Christmas day and Cupid’s night, Internet dating sites reportedly see a surge in traffic.

Social psychologists say that’s true now more than ever. In years past, people were more skeptical about putting personal information online and didn’t know which sites to trust. Has that changed? Social networking sites are a daily, if not hourly, habit for millions of Americans. So why not put your Facebook profile on OkCupid, too?

Plus, sites such as eHarmony and Match.com have been advertising long enough that their brand name recognition adds to a sense of trust for singletons. Nevertheless, does this increasing popularity correlate to their effectiveness? If the Internet made shopping for books and music easier, can it simplify match-making, too?

WEIGH IN: Does e-dating still have stigma in your social circles? What is the right way and the wrong way to find love in cyberspace?

Guest: Benjamin Karney, Ph. D., Professor of Social Psychology at UCLA, studying marriage and intimate relationship. Karney just contributed to a review of Internet dating for the journal, Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Thomas Bradbury, Ph. D., Professor of Psychology at UCLA, studying marriage; Member, Scientific Advisory Board, eHarmony.

via Source

What role do our surroundings have in the choices we make? Consider the fact that we are more likely to commit a “random” act of kindness toward a person who has already done something kind toward us. We are less likely to help someone in serious trouble when we’re in a crowd, or choose different professions based on the sound and spelling of our first names. It turns out the context in which we make our decisions has a huge impact on their outcomes.

In his new book “Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World,” author Sam Sommers, an associate professor of psychology at Tufts University, looks at what context can teach us about everything from test questions to romantic partners to career choices. Sommers offers a fascinating glimpse into the way our most important judgments are framed by the world around us.

Salon spoke with Sommers over the phone about Occupy Wall Street, online dating and Penn State’s Joe Paterno riot.

In the book you argue that this perception that, as you describe it, “What you see is what you get” is flawed and dangerous. Why are judgments based on first impressions misguided? It’s our default assumption. It’s our fallback, automatic assumption about other people. It serves us well in a lot of respects. It makes the world a more predictable place. It allows us to make predictions about the world. But a variety of different research over the past few decades shows that this automatic judgment is a cognitive cutting of corners. It doesn’t give an accurate perspective on how human nature works. One of the really good examples is the quickness with which we turn to the “bad apple” explanation. When we read about bad behavior, whether it’s people committing crimes, rioting, etc., we immediately assume that that person is a bad apple, that we would never do something like that. It makes us feel better about ourselves at the end of the day, but it keeps us from solving some of the root issues at the heart of human nature.

In the book you discuss crowd mentality and conformity in detail. Reading these chapters, I couldn’t help thinking about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Occupy Wall Street is all about power in numbers, but it seems that this may also be its downfall, since there’s no clear leadership. It’s a good question. It can be related to the Tea Party rallies as well. I think conformity is the glue that holds our society together. Can you imagine walking down the street in Manhattan without conformity? It would be chaos, or more chaotic than it already is. The interesting thing is that we prefer being in groups of others who are similar. We like people who agree with us on issues, we even like people who imitate our own body movements. So, enjoying being in a group isn’t always the same thing as creating the most effective group. I think that is the big issue that faces the Occupy movement. Occupy has people feeling empowered, and surrounded by many other like-minded (or perceived to be like-minded) people. It feels good. At the same time, where is the mission statement or the list of directives? Where do you go from here? Conformity helps keep society together but it doesn’t always move us forward toward goals that are the most advantageous. That is one of the big challenges that Occupy is facing right now. You’ve got a bunch of people in the same place drawn together by similar concerns, but it’s unclear what those concerns are and where they are headed from here.

The Penn State riots over Joe Paterno’s dismissal in the wake of the Sandusky scandal seems to me a good example of crowd mentality gone awry. As a social psychologist and a big-time sports fan from my days at Michigan, one thing I’ve noticed is that it doesn’t take much for any college football fan to riot. For most of us who don’t have a connection to Penn State, it was really jarring. We thought, How can you be upset about Paterno when we’re talking about dozens of children being sexually exploited? It seems crazy. It’s out of whack in terms of priority. But we need to remember what it’s like when something bad happens to a group with a strong affiliation. It’s amazing how able we are to rationalize things like this. As a Penn State fan, you are thinking, Paterno didn’t actually do anything wrong himself, he has done some great things for the University, he didn’t really know the full extent of Sandusky’s crimes, and now he is the subject of a witch hunt. You convince yourself into believing that. It’s not just being a sports fan, it’s human psychology to see the world through a self-serving filter.

I guess there is also validation in the self-deception when you have other people “on your team,” no pun intended. Absolutely. There’s the bonding and validation of looking around and everyone supporting him. The library is named after him. They are thinking; I go to this university, Paterno is like a god here and he is a virtuous coach in a somewhat nefarious body of coaches in college athletics over the past couple of decades. You could see how, especially in a small town where everything is focused on football, you could view Paterno as being one of the victims here.

One point that I found particularly fascinating in the book is that we tend to have pretty skewed opinions of ourselves. You also mention that happier people are more likely to have an unrealistic self-perception. I think most of us have the intuition that people who are sad or depressed are like Eeyore from “Winnie The Poo”: Woe is me, everything is terrible. What’s really interesting is that the research suggests that people with depressive symptoms often have a more accurate view of the self. People who are “normal” — or healthy, functioning individuals — tend to have a skewed view of themselves. It’s just skewed in a positive direction.

When you think about it, there are a huge number of tools in our toolbox of self-deception that make us look better to ourselves than we probably should. For example, 85 percent of us think we are above-average drivers, which is mathematically ridiculous. It ranges from that idea that “I’m better than average” to the behavior where we avoid situations in which we might not do well. There is research suggesting that people with more narcissistic personalities and high self-esteem are not particularly good at dealing with negative feedback. They don’t persevere when they struggle. Instead they cut their losses and try something else. The lengths we go to in order to feel good about ourselves are often considerable. Self-deception seems to be a pretty ubiquitous component with what we think of as “normal mental health functioning.” 

In the book you discuss the ways in which we tend to rely more than we should on preconceived “differences” between men and women. You mention our tendency to force gendered behavior onto children, and I found this really relevant. Raising children in less gender-specific environments is a progressive goal, but unfortunately, I don’t see the policing of children’s gender coming to an end any time soon. It’s a really deeply ingrained norm and expectation that we have. Parents of newborns take only seconds after their child is born to describe their infant with different adjectives for a boy or a girl. I really do think some of it is owed to “what you see is what you get”; men and women have different bodies and we like to hang our hat on difference. But newborn babies are the same and they don’t act noticeably different at that age. We still treat them differently and I think it’s an illustration of how we get caught up in what we assume to be internal and immutable difference instead of a cultural institution. I go to the toy store and they have different shelves for boys’ and girls’ toys. The guy at the fast food restaurant still needs to know the gender of my child before he can give them a happy meal. It’s everywhere.

In the book you allude to how circumstance affects romantic relationships. We tend to think of love in the proverbial “fairy tale” terms. But in the book you point out that love is more practical than we’d like to think. My wife hates that chapter but I actually think it’s still optimistic. You ask people what are the factors that influence their attraction to someone and they think in terms of body type, appearance and personal traits. But the circumstances and the context in which we live play an enormous role in who we are attracted to.

Proximity is first and foremost. Whether we are talking about romantic relationships or our close friends, most of us would have very different intimate relationships if we had gone to a different college, worked in a different building, lived in a different apartment or joined a different gym. Similarity is another one. There is this “opposites attract” theory but there is not a lot of support for it scientifically. Similarity seems to influence who we end up with both in terms of similar interests and backgrounds, but also similar appearance level and similar physical characteristics. If we look at online dating, people don’t just send emails to the most attractive profiles. Instead, people who are highly attractive tend to send emails to other folks who are highly attractive. People who are more moderate in their levels of objectively rated attraction tend to send more emails to other people who are in that moderate level. It’s like we have an implicit sense of who is “in my league.” Similarity and proximity are hugely important, but I’ve actually gotten booed before in class when I’ve said that. People think that conclusion renders love less real and meaningful, but that’s not what I’m arguing. I’m arguing that we have the potential to form romantic connections to a wide range of people. That’s actually liberating.

Your chapter on hate seemed to posit that we prefer others who are culturally and racially similar to us while we dislike difference. One interesting point that you make, which I found to be pretty accurate, is that people feel very uncomfortable admitting that these preferences are real. I’m thinking of the term “post-racial,” which came into popularity in conjunction with Obama’s presidency, but your research might suggest that we don’t in fact live in a post-racial environment. We don’t live in a “post-racial” environment. Absolutely not. We have a way of viewing the world around us in terms of categories. It’s how we learn, as a child, to deal with things in our environment. We see people in terms of social categories like race, gender and age. This colors the way we interact with others and what we expect of them. A lot of people are resistant to accepting this or addressing it. If we continue to maintain this party line — the one illustrated by Stephen Colbert’s joke where he looks at a black person and says, “I don’t see color. Are you a black man?” — that doesn’t solve anything. My research suggests that that tactic backfires. People don’t tend to make a very good impression this way. They are viewed as disingenuous and distracted in diverse settings when they pretend not to notice race.

So how can we improve our approach to ethnic bias? The more uplifting take on this is, if we can all accept that we see the world in terms of categories, we can make use of that information in navigating our social universe. We need to ask how to have these kinds of conversations and how to correct these kinds of tendencies. It’s a conversation we have on my university campus and in other organizations. It’s good to want diversity and to want to have people from different backgrounds together, but if we are going to pretend that we’re all the same, then it doesn’t really do us any good. I think that resistance to talking about race and accepting that race still makes a difference in our society and affects all of us, is a big problem. The “what you see is what you get” idea comes into bearing because often when we do have these discussions it becomes about who’s racist, is this behavior racist? And that’s a discussion that no one ever wins.

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Pregnant women have long complained that their condition makes them forgetful. Now a researcher has claimed there may be scientific truth in this ‘baby brain’ syndrome – and that there is a very good reason why expectant mothers develop short-term memory loss. The suggestion is that women’s brains change during pregnancy so that they will be better able to concentrate on their newborn’s needs after the birth, with the result that they become less focused on other things, such as where the car keys might be.

Laura Glynn, a psychologist at Chapman University, California, claims that these changes may be brought about by massive fluctuations in women’s hormones as well as tiny movements by the foetus. Dr Glynn has carried out extensive research on already published studies that look at how women’s brains and emotions change during pregnancy. She said that there ‘may be some cost’ of these changes – such as absent-mindedness – ‘but the benefit is a more sensitive,  effective mother’.

Dr Glynn also says that just the slightest movement of the foetus in the womb can affect a woman’s brain and make her become more sensitive. She claims that even though the woman may not be aware of these movements they will raise her  heart rate. ‘Pregnancy is a critical period for central nervous system development in mothers,  yet we know virtually nothing about it,’  said Dr Glynn, whose research is published in the journal Current Directions In Psychological Science.

She also says that cells from the foetus will pass into the mother’s bloodstream which will also affect the way her brain works. ‘It’s exciting to think about whether those cells are attracted to certain regions in the brain,’ she added.There has been considerable debate in recent years among academics as to whether ‘baby brain’ really exists.  Last year, Australian scientists who had studied  1,200 women claimed there was no evidence to suggest that they had become any  more forgetful. The researchers made women sit memory tests before, during and after pregnancy  and found there was very little difference in the scores.

In fact the study claimed that women ‘tricked themselves’ into thinking they were becoming more absent-minded simply because they had been told this was a likely symptom of pregnancy. But Dr Glynn insists that we do not know enough about what really happens because there has so far there has been very little research into what occurs to women’s brains during pregnancy.

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Previous studies have shown that various animals, from honeybees to chimpanzees, can learn to count when trained with food rewards. In 1998, researchers discovered that rhesus monkeys can not only learn to count to four, but can also pick up on numerical rules and apply them to numbers they haven’t seen before, allowing them to count up to nine without further training. With this finding in mind, psychologists at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, sought to find out if pigeons  another animal shown to count have a numerical competence similar to rhesus monkeys.

“ Pigeons are the perfect subjects for visual tasks, because their vision is really good and they’re really easy to train,” said psychologist Damian Scarf, first author of the new study. “It appears that you can train them on almost any task you can train monkeys on.” Scarf and his colleagues first trained three pigeons to count up to three. On a touchscreen, they presented the pigeons with a set of images that had objects of various sizes, shapes and colors. For example, one set presented images with one yellow block, two red cylinders or three yellow rectangles. To receive a treat, the pigeons had to select the images in the correct object-number order, from lowest to highest.

Once the birds learned to count to three, the researchers began showing the pigeons images with up to nine objects. On average, without higher-number training or food rewards, the pigeons were able to correctly order the image sets over 70 percent of the time. The pigeons had an easier time discriminating between lower numbers and numbers that were further apart.”Once you start getting up towards seven, eight and nine, it was very difficult for (the pigeons) to tell the difference between the images,” Scarf told LiveScience. Overall, the results of the study echoed those of the rhesus monkey research, though Scarf noted it took longer to train the pigeons than other researchers took training monkeys.

William Roberts, a University of Western Ontario psychologist who was not involved in the research, was surprised by the study’s results. “I didn’t anticipate that pigeons could have done that,” said Roberts, who has previously researched animal cognition, including pigeon intelligence. Roberts is curious to see how widespread this ability is in the animal kingdom. “Can we find evidence for this type of counting in insects, particularly bees?” he said. Finding the same level of numerical competence as the pigeons (and rhesus monkeys) in other species would help scientists understand if the ability evolved across species separately, or if a common ancestor shared the ability.

“We now have another piece of (the) puzzle,” said Scarf, who is interested in performing similar experiments in parrots and other intelligent birds. “What’s the origin of the ability?”

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A small study published online in the Annals of Rheumatic Diseases reveals that “Mindfulness” exercises, irrespective of how difficult they are, that focus on experiencing the present moment can help to limit the stress and fatigue linked to painful rheumatoid joint disease.

Researchers assessed 73 patients aged between 20 and 70 years with painful joint disease due to rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, or psoriatic arthritisfor a minimum of 12 months. Half of the patients were randomly allocated to receive 10 group sessions of “mindfulness” exercises over a course of 15 weeks, plus a booster session about 6 months following the completion of the course, whilst the other half received standard care plus a CD with similar exercises home use, as and when they wanted. 

The exercise sessions, which were part of VTP’s Vitality Training Program, were held by healthcare professionals who were trained in mindfulness techniques. During each session they addressed particular topics, including the recognition of each individual’s limitations as well as dealing with strong emotions like anger, joy and sorrow. Participants were encouraged to practice awareness and deliberately focus on their feelings, thoughts and bodily experiences without judging or trying to avoid them. This also applied to pain. Other sessions consisted of creative exercises like guided imagery, music and drawing and subsequently sharing experiences with other group members.

After all 10 sessions were finished the researchers evaluated the participants’ coping abilities, stress levels and symptom control, including pain and fatigue by using validated scores. The assessment was repeated 12 months later. From a total of 67 participants who completed all assessments, the researchers observed no differences in pain levels, disease activity or the ability to talk about feelings, however they did observe substantial differences in stress levels and fatigue. From 13 participants who scored a high stress score of over 23 in the GHQ-20 questionnaire 11 participants stress level was lower, with only two maintaining their high stress score after just 12 months after the sessions had finished, whilst in the control group 10 participants started out with a high stress score of over 23 with eight reporting lower levels of stress.

The researchers did however note a significant reduction in measured levels of fatigue amongst the intervention group whereas the control group reported no such change. According to the researchers, earlier attempts of using psychological and educational tactics to help arthritis sufferers cope better with the distressing aspects of their disease tended to be short term. They say the lasting improvements observed in the VTP course: “indicate that the participants may have incorporated some mindfulness strategies into their daily lives and that these strategies have strengthened their ability to respond to their stressful experience in a more flexible way,” emphasizing that although rheumatoid arthritis therapies have greatly improved, they tend to be less effective in individuals in whom the disease is more established. They continue saying that ultimately the disease can only be controlled in part and that it forces many patients to undertake extremely demanding changes in their style of life.

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The more a baby is attached to his mom during childhood, the better he is at resolving relationship conflicts and enjoying stable, satisfying ties with their romantic partners in early adulthood, the researchers found. ”It”s often very difficult to find the lingering effects of early life being related to adult behaviour, because life circumstances change,” said study author Jeffry Simpson, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota.

“People change, but there”s a kernel of stability from early experience in a lot of people,” Simpson was quoted as saying by Live Science. For their study, published in journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, Simpson and his colleagues reviewed data from 75 children born in 1976 and 1977 as part of the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation, whose mothers received free prenatal care. These firstborn kids were assessed at regular intervals with interviews, teachers” and parents” ratings and other observations, culminating with their relationships with their romantic partners at ages 20 and 21.

When the children were 12 and 18 months old, they were videotaped in a stressful lab procedure called “Strange Situation,” in which the children were separated and reunited with their mothers. Those who were deemed to have an insecure attachment with their mothers — meaning they remained distressed throughout the experiment — reported more negative emotions when trying to resolve major relationship conflicts with their romantic partners two decades later.

However, Simpson noted that these results were affected by factors such as the children”s social skills in elementary school and the strength of their relationships with their best friend at age 16, which had also been monitored.

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The National Obesity Forum and International Chair on Cardiometabolic Risk said it was important to be upfront because of the health risks. Being overweight – particularly around the waist – increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease and stroke. But a poll by the groups suggests too many people shy away from the issue.

The survey of more than 2,000 people found 42% of 18 to 24-year-olds would not tell a loved one they should lose weight because of a fear they would hurt the other person’s feelings. For those aged 25 to 44 it was just over a third, while for older people it was about one in four. Men find it hardest to tell their partners, while women were more worried about bringing up the issue with a friend.

But with families and friends getting together up and down the country over the festive period, the experts believe there is an opportunity that should not be missed. Prof David Haslam, chair of the National Obesity Forum, said: “Suggesting to someone that they should consider losing a few pounds may not be a comfortable conversation to have. “But if someone close to you has a large waistline then as long as you do it sensitively, discussing it with them now could help them avoid critical health risks later down the line and could even save their life.”

Dr Jean Pierre Despres, scientific director of the International Chair on Cardiometabolic Risk, agreed. ”Start by encouraging someone close to you to make simple lifestyle changes such as becoming more active, making small alterations to their eating habits and replacing sugary drinks with water.”

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During the holidays people can experience an enormous amount of stress, even more so these days with a bad economy thrown in. But a study finds that having some adverse experiences in the past may make you mentally tougher.

A meta-analysis of studies that looked at how traumatic events affect mental health and well-being found a pattern. Those on opposite ends of the spectrum — people who had no or few hardships or many adversities — generally had worse coping skills than those who had some bad times, such as a serious illness or injury to themselves or a loved one, a death in the family or a divorce.

In one study researchers found that among people with chronic back pain, those with some adversity in their past were less functionally impaired compared to those with a great deal of past trauma, or no major traumas. The middle group also had fewer doctor visits related to back pain and were less likely to use prescription painkillers.

Why do those with low to moderate levels of hardships have more resilience to handle major or minor difficulties? Study author Mark Seery of the University at Buffalo in New York suggests there could be a number of factors at play, including having a sense of mastering past hurdles, feeling in control, building social support networks and stimulating cell growth in areas of the brain that relate to coping.

“Negative events have negative effects,” Seery said in a news release. “I really look at this as being a silver lining. Just because something bad has happened to someone doesn’t mean they’re doomed to be damaged from that point on.”

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It appears that knee pain of some kind is a common complaint in middle-aged and mature women, with varying possible causes leading to varying types of pain. A new study on knee-pain patterns assessed periodically over 12 years in a representative UK population finds that nearly two-thirds (63%) of women aged 50 and over experience knee pain at least once, persistently, or intermittently over such a period. The authors found these patterns were more likely in women with higher BMI, with a previous knee injury, or whose scans showed they had osteoarthritis (OA). They write about their findings in the 19 December online issue of the journalArthritis & Rheumatism.

Senior author Dr Nigel Arden, a Professor of Rheumatology at the University of Oxford in the UK, told the media that this was the first study involving community-based participants that investigates patterns of knee pain using “multiple assessment points” over a period of 12 years: ”Understanding the prevalence and predictors of knee pain is the first step in developing comprehensive pain assessment plans that could lead to more targeted treatment options for those burdened by OA.”

For their analysis, Arden and colleagues used data gathered in the Chingford Study, a prospective population-based study of OA and osteoporosis established in 1989. This started with more than 1,000 women aged from 44 to 57 (median 52) years. The cohort is described as representative of women in the UK in general in terms of height, weight, and smoking status. At four times over the 12 years of the study, the participants completed questionnaires about their knee pain.  From their responses the researchers classed the 489 participants who were still in the study at the end into one of four groups, depending on their pain characteristics: asymptomatic, persistent, incident, and intermittent.

The results showed that:

• 44% of women reported experiencing “any days of pain”.
• 23% reported experiencing “pain on most days of the previous month”.
• Of those experiencing “any pain”, 9% had persistent pain, 24% had incident pain, and 29% had intermittent pain.
• Of those experiencing “pain on most days”, these figures were 2%, 16% and 18% respectively.
• A higher BMI predicted persistent and incident patterns of pain, while radiographic OA predicted persistent pain.
• Those who reported a previous knee injury were more likely to have persistent or intermittent patterns of pain.

The researchers conclude the results show a “significant variability” in patterns of knee pain over time in this representative population, with few participants “consistently reporting knee pain at each time point”. They also suggest that a strength of the study is that it describes a natural history of knee pain over a long period of time, taking data from several points along that timescale. Finding that separate factors appear to predict pain patterns differently (eg BMI predicted persistent and incident patterns while OA predicted only persistent pain patterns) may be why studies that measure pain at one time point seem to show inconsistent relationships between pain predictors and pain patterns, they add.

Arden said: ”Validation of our findings through reproduction in other patient groups is needed to advance knowledge of knee pain predictors that will ultimately enhance prevention and treatment strategies for those with OA.”

OA is a leading cause of disability throughout the world. In the US, the American College of Rheumatology estimates that over 27 million Americans over the age of 25 are living with the disease, with pain being the most problematic symptom. The damage to the economy that can be linked to OA is substantial. In the UK, reports suggest it accounts for £3.2 billion a year loss in productivity. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) puts the cost of job-related OA at between $3.4 and $13.2 billion a year. Previous studies indicate that OA of the knee in particular is linked to reduced physical function and is a substantial burden to society. According to figures from the CDC, nearly half a million total knee replacements were carried out in the the US in 2004, with around $14 billion spent on the hospital costs of such an operation.

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